Chicago Biking Conditions and Advice Wiki
Newsflash No news to report at this time. Welcome to the Wiki Welcome to the Bike Chicago Wiki. We’re a collaborative community website to track biking conditions and information for Chicago bikers. This should be particularly helpful for the winter when cycling conditions can be treacherous. Simply hit the 'edit' link to update/correct/elaborate on road/trail conditions. Please put in general reports as well as dated winter weather condition reports. If your report is more up-to-date than a previous one, please delete the old one so it doesn't get too cluttered. Please tell other bikers who might be interested about the Wiki. The more people who use it, the more helpful a tool this will become. If you run another bike related website/blog, please add your links to the external link section if you feel it would be of interest to the readers here. 'RSS feed for updates to the Wiki': To subscribe to this wiki as an RSS feed (blog) all you need to do is have your RSS reader subscribed to the edit history page. Lakefront trail conditions (ordered from South to North) '57th Street to 31st Street' * 31st to Museum Campus (Solidarity Drive @ 1300 S) * Museum Campus (Solidarity Drive @ 1300 S) to Grand Ave (520 N, Chicago River) * Grand Ave (520 N) to Chicago Ave (800 N) * E. Chicago (800N) to E. Lake Shore Drive (1000N) * 'E Lake Shore Drive (1000N) to North (1600N)' * 'North (1600N) to Fullerton (2400N)' * Fullerton (2400N) to Belmont (3200N) * Belmont (3200N) to Ardmore (5800N) * Other information on the trail * Current condition updates at twitter hashtag #ChiLFT. * Though infrequently updated, sometimes more information on the trail can be found at: http://www.activetrans.org/lakefront * ActiveTrans provides updates about Lake Front Trail condistions via Twitter: @activetransLFT. * You can report conditions about the Lake Front Trail via Twitter using the hashtag #CHILFT. * Understand the latest conditions on Chicago Lakefront Trail Conditions . Road Conditions Around the City *'Broadway 6400N to 2800N' ** *'Clark 2800N to 400N' ** *'Elston' ** *'Irving Park Road 2200 W to 3600 W' ** * Wells 1800N to 500N ** * Damen 4000N to 2800N ' ** Evanston *'N. Sheridan Loop Near Calvary Cemetary ** **Another option for riding to and from Evanston is Chicago Ave on the west side of Calvary Cemetary. There is a bike lane and shared road signs as well. Just be careful riding north from Howard - there are often cars parked across from the U-Haul dealer and you may need to take the full lane to pass. **Also, be aware the the southbound bike line on Chicago Ave. has cracked pavement and is often strewn with sticks. At night, I don't feel it's safe to bike on. * *'Lakeshore path from Greenwood St to Sheridan Road' ** Bikes on Buses and Trains *'Public transit' **CTA Buses - All buses contain racks **CTA Trains - Not allowed on during rush hours ((7:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.) **Metra - See http://www.stevevance.net/metra/ *'Northwestern University Shuttles': **Intercampus shuttles (Evanston to Chicago Campus) have bike racks on front of them which hold two bikes. Normally they work fine and there is space, but there are occasional difficulties (e.g. broken or missing racks). If you observce problems please email these addresses (the first address is the offical one, but I've had mediocre luck getting responses from them, so the others might be worth it as well): shuttle@northwestern.edu, uservices@northwestern.edu>, z-robinson@northwestern.edu, m-grzeszczuk@northwestern.edu, chicagoparking@northwestern.edu Discussion General discussion glad to find this wiki, looking forward to contributing, I agree that the active trans biking condiitions page is not very helpful. I ride commute the lake front year round and plan to post conditions as they happen. I'm out of town returning to Chicago tomorrow. I know chicago got alot of snow, any new updates? MRP 12/27/10 - Good to have another contributor. From the looks of it, we have at least a few unique contributors so far, and the website only started recently. I suspect it will get a little higher traffic as the holidays wind down and that the contributions will snowball a bit as more contribute and it becomes more useful. I biked from Downtown up to Rogers Park yesterday evening (12/26/10). I didn't even try to get on the Lakeshore path. Given the poor conditions of the sidewalks, I guessed that the trail was a mess. The roads were ok, but not great. I didn't have a problem of getting sprayed by slush from the cars and it was clear enough going. How we should use the wiki 12/28/2010 - What is the protocol for deleting dated (and no longer accurate) information? Should one delete it, or leave it for purposes of comparison? (JCS) 12/28/10 - I'd suggest deleting it. I am pretty sure all changes are kept regardless..so those who want to compare can go back and look at that. Otherwise I think it will get too crowded. What do others think? 12/29/2010 - My inclination is to delete old information when updating, to keep the page from getting too crowded and to present just the most recent conditions. (JCS) Twitter feed 11/05/13 -- Chicago Lakefront Trail Conditions launches as a website that quickly distills the latest information posted to Twitter with the #chiLFT hashtag. It pulls out keywords from people's messages (like icy, windy, and wet) to visually communicate the most recently reported biking conditions. 3/8/11 -- Active Trans launched our updated Lakefront Trail Conditions service today. We're broadcasting updates from @activetransLFT and encouraging trail users to share their own updates using the hashtag #CHILFT. We will retweet updates from the community as well. More info . 1/11/11 - Active Trans has actually been working on a Twitter system for trail users to receive and share lakefront trail updates. It'll be part of an update to our http://www.activetrans.org/lakefront page. Watch for the launch early next month. -- Lee Crandell, Active Trans 12/30/10 - Samantha over at Ding Ding Let's Ride suggested that some sort of integrated twitter feed might be good for this. I don't use twitter myself, and am not quite sure how this would work--but think it could be a very good idea. Let's see if we can develp the idea further here: External Links *Lakefront Trail Conditions *Active Transportation Alliance: Lakefront Conditions *The Chainlink: Discussions, Events, Photos *Ding Ding, Let's Ride: Chicago bicycle culture blog *Bike Commuters: all about bike commuting *Streetsblog Chicago: Livable streets news and issues Latest activity Category:Browse